I like Krystal Ball a lot (yes: her real name). She’s been one of the most articulate, entertaining and combative US left-wing voices over the past few years. She started on a channel called MSNBC which, like other mainstream US TV media, can promote a specific political viewpoint with no need for a ‘balance’. President Ronald “Mad Dog” (McDonald) “Ray-Gun” Reagan junked the US’ ‘equal time’ laws in the 1980s and that led to propaganda like Fox “News” and its liberal counterpoints like MSNBC but she had enough cojones to go onto the channel and ask that Hillary Clinton not run in the 2016 election.
Very admirable and prescient and, she suspects, part of the reason why she was ‘let go’ soon afterwards. She later truly made her progressive bones by providing the left-wing critique on the successful internet show ‘Rising’ and was a strong advocate for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 and 2020 runs. She’s always been someone who took pains to recognise the horror of the US electoral system and that, if left-wingers were going to choose the lesser evil neoliberal choice of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, that they should do so by holding their vote hostage.
Yet, now, last week, she seemingly incinerated her own brand with the above shocking, condescending orgy of finger-wagging on the Status Coup channel. Spitting “grow up!” at least three times and talking down about alternatives to the, as she said previously, “stab me; shoot me” choice always puked up in US presidential elections. Why? Maybe she was having a bad day? Maybe she was shocked at how her pick for a primary election challenge to Biden (her friend Marianne Williamson) was demolished by the Revolutionary Blackout Network channel this week? Although Status Coup themselves exposed Williamson just as badly, by showing that Williamson wouldn’t go hard at Biden and would surely “fall in line” anyway.
US election cycles are a sickeningly Kafkaesque charade of the useless, the vicious and the corrupt. At least until Bernie Sanders decided to stand against virtually anointed hot favourite Hillary Clinton. He managed to win almost half of the states and DC but she was never not out in front. As such, the narrative is, is that he wouldn’t take his beating and, by doing so, harmed Clinton as she then took on Donald Trump. Although that’s the purpose of primaries: they battle test candidates and hash out weak spots, not save them for the general election.
Contrary to legend, Sanders went easy on Clinton, never laying a glove on her. In 2020, Sanders had the network, the money and the experience and still failed miserably. Getting caught flat-footed as the Democrats consolidated behind Joe Biden was entirely maladroit. Again, Sanders pulled his punches but even more so. Although starting both runs in his seventies and so, one would think, able to go out with all guns blazing, Sanders was a paper tiger and reduced to being good soldier, a company man, by the end. Even though he’s nominally an independent ‘democratic socialist’, whatever that means (a social democrat, essentially), he’s a good, big ‘D’ Democrat in all but name.
Ball, in more forgiving, slightly less patronising mode, has previously said that she understands the deflating and disconnection in progressive voters’ minds because they had their hearts broken twice but it was less their hearts and more their wallets broken open. One of the most attractive, positive moves in politics in the last few years was the notion of politicians running on ‘small dollar’ donations of the people, from the working-class, themselves.
Politicians get stuck in an endless circle of begging for money from rich donors because it costs to run for election. Some spend most of the day on the phone trying to extract money. As a result, that money will absolutely come with strings attached and, slowly but surely, it’ll be the donors who get served above the people. So Sanders and many others in his wake took this route to finance themselves yet what was the most positive move is actually one of the worst things they could’ve done. Why?
The transaction between the candidate and the public was “finance my campaign and I’ll fight for you” but the goalposts got moved and the nature of the “fight” became very elastic. What should have happened was that the public SAW the fights going on; that it was all in plain sight. If that had happened, the public might have been keen to finance another insurgent campaign because, if they lost, the arguments would still be made and, in gridiron parlance, the ball would continue to get moved forwards up the field.
What actually happened is that Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez et al all ‘fell in line’ and did exactly what they were told. Any questions about ‘so when are you going to start fighting?’ were met with “we ARE fighting…behind closed doors” which might be true, if we’re being extremely generous, but which maps exactly with doing absolutely nothing. As a result, the US working-class feels like they got taken by snake oil salesmen and that’s why they have started to make all of the noises about not wanting to run this experiment again. This livestream of support and publicity for left-wing candidates under the Democratic Party almost a year ago got eviscerated in its live chat: not against any of the participants but against panhandling the US working-class again. Its comments section shows it no mercy either.
That’s just a skim overview of the issues involved however that’s the main one: you want money AGAIN? Shouldn’t the US working-class spend their money more productively? Running local campaigns including mutual aid drives in which everyone looks after everyone else? That $100 million given to Bernie Sanders got nothing in return and now you want to such money again? After a while, quixotic American political campaigns become indistinguishable from televangelism, similarly enacted upon the backs of the poor:
Krystal Ball and others aren’t talking gobbledygook. It is a fact of mathematics and reality that the next presidential election will see either a Republican or a Democrat in the White House. So, what’s the problem? Why shouldn’t Krystal be crystal clear on this stone, cold fact? Because as she herself has opined many times before, if you keep delivering your vote to the Democrats, like pizza, you give them zero reason to not come back with a similarly unsavoury offer next time but a little bit worse because they know that they’ve got you by the short hairs. It’s an endless circle of uselessness that you, as a US citizen, get bullied into accepting. Indeed, when the supposed ‘lesser evil’ president, like Biden, does something egregious, they can go: “I won the election! People voted for me and my platform”. Leaving out that millions merely used him as a tool to vote against the even worse option, not for Joe Biden.
And once the primary process has ended and the nominal challenger – in 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders but perhaps Marianne Williamson in 2024 – pouts and says that their supporters have to vote for the winner (after spending the previous months running on the basis that, no, you shouldn’t vote for them and here’s why….) people get demoralised and have their hopes smashed while being subject to the same proffering of how a shit sandwich is, perhaps, not so unappetising after all, when compared to the ‘shit sandwich with added broken glass’ other option.
It’s a grotesque chokehold and there’s no way out. Well, there would actually be one way to sell the argument proffered by Noam Chomsky – wheeled out on casters every four years to tell people to vote for the neoliberal Democrat then ignored for another four years until the next time – when he says that you shouldn’t any take more attention of presidential votes than the time it takes to vote. That could work but only if those proffering it never talk about presidential elections until the day of the voting. “Oh, yeah, in other news, the presidential election is today….” but they don’t. They start jibber-jabbering about polls and the general horse race for months, for years. Dangling the carrot that things could change and funnelling leftists in behind the Democratic Party. If you want to be really harsh, you could liken them to groomers.
Vote Democrat: so that the Democratic Party know that they can take you for granted and never, ever have to offer a better prospectus to earn your vote. Or: vote Green Party and allow the even worse option (the Republicans) an easier ride, now having one less vote that they have to match. Or: don’t vote at all and have your disgust with their whole filthy charade waved away as disinterest instead. Or: go to bed and never get up again. Ever.
The nation’s sweetheart
What people miss, though, is that a third party in a US presidential election, doesn’t have to win. Naysayers whine that they’ll never win as an argument against their existence but they don’t have to. In a two-party system, you either take over one of the spots in a two horse race and then, hopefully, change the system or you run so as to influence the party closest to you. Exhibit A: human gargoyle Nigel Farage. A horrible scoundrel and yet a political genius.
In the 2015 UK general election, he and his UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party) ran to the right of the Conservatives. Like the US, Britain is also, in effect, a two-party system: any government will be Conservative-led or Labour-led. Fearing votes leaking away to UKIP, the Conservatives agreed to the ransom: give the country an in-out referendum on membership of the European Union and we’ll stand down. In the 2017 general election, all of the main parties stood on a platform of recognising the June 2016 OUT vote so Farage wasn’t really a factor. By 2018, UKIP mutated into the Brexit Party and the Brexit Party made all of the noises about running hard in the 2019 general election, to hammer home Brexit but, again, the Conservatives convinced them to stand down and, hence, Boris Johnson delivered the diamond-hard Brexit to the public, like a fish wrapped inside a bulletproof jacket.
With the next UK general election coming down the pike soon (could be any time between now and 12th December 2024, at the latest) Reform UK/née Brexit Party/née UKIP are, yet again, coming to run the Conservatives up a tree. Importantly, they aren’t holding their hands out for a deal thus showing that they aren’t serious, but are saying that they will run in all 650 seats and that they hope that the country never again has a Conservative government.
This is how you do politics. It is the art of getting others to bend the knee to you and getting them to do what you want them to do. If I was teaching a class on politics/current affairs, I’d include Lincoln – Daniel Day Lewis lying and bullying his way to ending slavery and the civil war – on the curriculum along with the church scene in The Untouchables. The right/conservatives seem to intrinsically comprehend that politics is a dirty street fight while the liberals and the left see it as tea party and hence they get rolled every single time.
In the US context, a Green Party that is polling on 7- 15% in August of an election year like 2024 would have colossal power. One of the elements that makes the US system so pernicious is that it is attractive for one of the major parties to lose. Yes, to lose. They get to stay important for the next four years but with none of the responsibility for the country going into the latrine while outsourcing blame for their loss (the youth vote; men not voting for a woman; the Green Party; outside countries influencing the result; Bernie Sanders: it’s never their fault) with the connivance of their swathe of the media landscape. However, while it is still in the mix, the spotlight and responsibility is on them. What’s cool is that as the media starts to bully the Greens, in the scenario, the Greens can say: “You want us to drop out…….? Okay! Here are the terms….”
You give the Democrats fifteen items from which to choose. A progressive “shopping list” of demands. You demand ten of them; the Democrats come back with three; you settle on five or six. Of the original fifteen, you make two or three of them ‘essential elements’: proposals on which you’ll brook no demurring whatsoever. Including ranked-choice voting, as that is the key to busting open the system. It’s what apologists and reformists like Ball say is the main reason for third parties being defeated before they start; that first-past-the-post funnels everything down to voting against the worst option rather than for something.
Ranked-choice voting (sometimes known as instant run-off voting or alternative vote) redistributes votes of the bottom candidate to others still in the race, since all voters vote preferences on as many, or as few, of the candidates as they like, until someone gets over 50%. It’s not perfect and it’s not proportional. Someone can lose while still getting more first choices than anyone else, for example, but it does allow a voter to vote Green but have the Democrat as a second choice or for the Libertarian, with Republican as second choice. People like Ball say: “Oh, we should push for ranked-choice voting…” but whom does one “push”? Republicans and Democrats have a lock on power. They’re perfectly content with politics as a two-horse race. Why wouldn’t they be? It has to be forced and having a Democratic Party over a barrel in summer 2024, with the media spotlight upon them, would be the right time to do it.
Reformists always posture that they’re open to other plans than to tiresomely fall into playing the Democratic primary game so here it is. Obviously, one would require a Green candidate who carries their balls around in a wheel barrow in front of them, so big are they; who doesn’t mind being shunned for the rest of their lives because they’d have to convince in the game of chicken, that they really will push through to the end unless the feckless Democratic Party were finally held to account and the onus put onto them, but are there any more Ralph Naders? Marianne Williamson gives off all the signs of not having the fortitude. I’ve got nothing against her and actually wrote a battleplan months ago or how she could do it, including some of the above ideas, but it would all be contingent on a ‘dirty break’ and her jumping to the Greens or a third party to keep her boot on the Democratic Party’s throat.
As is, it’ll probably all shake out to the same boring arguments and compromises and “we’ll get’em next time” fictions but this would be a way out. So much of politics seems to be down to being able to think counter-intuitively. You’d have to run to win, as a third party, in order to be believed and therefore indulged and taken seriously as someone who would bargain and actually get true, proper, meaningful concessions in exchange for stepping down and endorsing. Also, it’s counter to the prevailing hand-wringing in the US but that the left is fractured and splintered need not be a cause for weeping and wailing. Yes, Bernie Sanders sold them all out by allowing it all to evaporate but reformists like Ball would probably point to President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ reforms of the 1930s as evidence of what can be extracted from working within the system as if that was a gift from benevolent capitalists who saw sense and responded to reason.
Christopher Hedges would argue that it was nothing of the sort; that, essentially, the New Deal came from the communists, socialists and militant unionists being at the gates, holding pitchforks and lighted torches, and FDR saying to Wall Street that you’ll have to give up loads of money to stop the proletariat coming in to take everything while burning Wall Street to the ground. So, if the modern left is fractured, shouldn’t the reformists play the ‘good cop’ to the mad dog left’s ‘bad cop’ and value and cherish their unceasing loud demands, and sometimes coarse behaviour, as a battering ram, opening a hole for them to run into? One would think so but maybe they’re too busy protecting their own ‘brands’ and wanting to stay on collegial terms with those around them.
Conservative politics’ Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Study Nigel Farage and Richard Tice’s playbook, adapt it and use it for good instead of evil. Forget about third parties not being able to win. They have to run like they’re looking to win, for sure, but that stance opens the way for them to be taken seriously as impediments which need to be neutralised. The most consequential political figure in Britain in the forty-five years since Thatcher began her onslaught was never a prime minister; was someone who was never ever a member of parliament: it was and is Nigel Farage. Speaking of Genesis songs earlier, forcing through the paradigm change of ranked-choice voting and US progressives could figuratively enact at least the aesthetic of the ending of this video, from the Occupy era but feeling like right now, made by Spawn-creator Todd McFarlane for Disturbed’s cover version of ‘Land of Confusion’. Maybe aim for this outcome rather than more pouting and despair on the dime and the backs of the US working-class.
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